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Recent Quotes

What is the propaganda model and how does it work? Its crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); and they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who Read more…

We never claimed that the propaganda model explained everything or that it shows media omnipotence and complete effectiveness in manufacturing consent. It is a model of media behavior and performance, not of media effects. We explicitly pointed to the existence of alternative media, grassroots information sources, and public scepticism about media truthfulness as important limits Read more…

Last summer I took an informal poll at a meeting of eminent Wall Street investors to find out whether they would condone the use of torture to prevent a terrorist attack. The consensus was that they hoped somebody would do it without their knowing about it.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes.

I’m not trying to imply that the United States has done this on anything like the scale Saddam Hussein did. After all, it’s only had a year — Saddam had 35. And Saddam had the full support of the United States for his worst atrocities (war on Iran, Anfal campaign against the Kurds, suppression of Read more…

The president has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have a right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the Read more…

The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.

There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us.

We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be, make Read more…

In the absence of a state that provides basic order, social stability, a predictable continuity of life, people look to other modes of organization to fulfill some of that role. In totalitarian Iraq, the only other mode that could have even the slightest freedom was the religious. But in general, I think it’s fair to Read more…

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.

Truth that has merely been learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thought of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us.

The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, Read more…

The significance is clear – even the most rational and important ideas about ourselves and our world can be subject to near-totalitarian levels of suppression in the absence of conscious planning or deliberate censorship. Crucially, we believe, this suppression extends to the most elementary and important moral truisms of human culture.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Some of these young men think that war is all glory but let me say Read more…

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his Read more…

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power.

From the fight against the authority of Church, state, and family which characterise the last centuries, we have come back full circle to a new obedience; but this obedience is not one to aristocratic persons, but to the organisation. The ‘organisation man’ is not aware that he obeys, he believes that he only conforms with Read more…

God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made everyone happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn Read more…

liberated work is possible only in a society based on voluntary co-operation of productive groups, communities and soceities loosely federated together, eventually developing into free communism, actuated by a solidarity of interests

Self-censorship begins when writers submit articles, book manuscripts, and scripts to editors and producers who reject them or demand modifications. Often, there are good reasons. In the print media, it’s known as editing; in television and film, it’s known as notes, which could come from any of several dozen places, including executives whose only creative Read more…

Most biased choices in the media arise from the pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalised preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organisation, market, and political power.

As secrecy and the deception of governments grow more sophisticated, the need for explanation, investigation and polemic has never been more urgent; equally there is a need for journalists to make a stand against the bullies of their own industry.